ABSTRACT
Introduction During “the Lost Decade,” after the bursting of the bubble economy in Japan, the core features of the Japanese corporate system, such as the main bank system, stakeholder-oriented model of corporate governance, lifetime employment system, and supplier network, had faced strong pressures to change and had actually undergone significant changes. Even though the existing systems had changed, the question we have to ask here is “what,” “when,” and “how” they had changed. More concretely, what had actually changed and what had not? Were the methods of coping with such changes appropriate? If we could not provide a proper response to the changes that were occurring, why was it so? On the contrary, did we attempt to change things that did not really need to be changed?
